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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (17469)	5/14/2004 1:15:42 AM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

There are less biased sources than Doctors of Divinity promoting Christianity on Christian web sites. I liked this article. It shows what can happen when a fanatical ideology gains unbridled power in the hands of a ruthless "God" "Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely" hawaii.edu "...How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world. Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths..." "...But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers..." "...Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy."

To: average joe who wrote (17469)	5/14/2004 2:17:35 AM
From: Greg or e	Respond to of 28931

Good read; Thanks for the link Joe.

To: average joe who wrote (17469)	5/15/2004 8:39:07 AM
From: briskit	Respond to of 28931

Why Has Gambling Become "Cool"? 5/14/2004 5:42:39 PM Some talking head was yelling into the camera about college sports last night on ESPN, saying gambling has become an epidemic among athletes in Division I programs: Poker playing, untold hours spent in online casinos, soaking up "Texas Hold 'Em" tournaments on TV. He then predicted that this infusion of gambling would lead to a big point shaving or betting scandal at a major university in the next two or three years. I immediately thought of an article I had read just earlier this week in the Washington Monthly, which included this quote: "Three years ago, when I was a sophomore at Cornell University, there wasn't a game to be had. By the time I graduated, I could choose from several different games every night of the week." The "game" is poker, and the article itself amounts to a celebration of how cool the game has become among the "Internet generation." "Why," the writer asks, "are yuppies-in-the-making suddenly interested in poker...?" His reply is better than anything I could have scripted: "The answer may be that the popular image of the game has undergone a subtle recasting--one with a great attraction to ironic youngsters like me who find in the game the same slightly glamorous, slightly seedy, go-getter spirit that characterized the Internet boom." The "Internet boom," dear reader. His words, not mine. "Ironic youngsters" indeed. At least during the Internet boom, everyone thought the wealth would be spread around. But "Texas Hold 'Em" is an all or nothing showdown where most of the cards come face up and there's no cap on the number of raises. The environment is merciless. There is only one winner, whose success comes at the expense of every other player. When the larger social trend turns bearish, optimism is replaced by... Ruthlessness. elliottwave.com